Move over Discord, Mumble has rolled back into town with a massive new release for this open source voice chat application.

This is the first major release of Mumble in a few years, so of course it comes with some truly massive changes. Checking on it Mumble 1.2 was release all the way back in December, 2009! Nearly 10 years in the making—holy cow!

Here's some highlights for you:

New Lite and Dark themes.

Individual user volume adjustment.

A new shortcut to change your voice transmission mode between: voice activation, push to talk and continuous and a toolbar to select it too.

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Mumble "just" does what it's meant for: voice chat. And that is does brilliantly.
Discord is more like a bit of everything, voice chat, chatting (like irc with channels), video chat, streaming (lately), even game distribution...
I still prefer Mumble over Discord, as I can host it myself, so I have full control over it and nothing is monitored. Also with Mumble I can do a fancy audio setup, where I can filter channels for streaming, when people don't want to be audible on stream. That's just not possible with Discord (yet).
Again it's more like, the right tool for the right task. And Mumble does an awesome job for voice chatting.

There's always a special place in my heart for Mumble. Unfortunately, I don't know too many gamers that would use that anymore.

Also, I prefer Steam's integrated chat/VOIP system, but even with that being integrated into the number one gaming distribution around, it's not utilized nearly as much as the bloated bit of abjectly horrible spyware that is Discord.

That being said, there is an alternative client to Discord that I use that piggybacks off of Discord's protocols:

It's not spyware and still works with Discord or Slack. My only gripe about it is that the Linux client doesn't have a PTT feature yet (voice activity only). But it works well. Already fairly configurable and much leaner and cleaner than Discord.

GustyGhostDiscord effectively stole all of my gaming buddies away from me. We had a good thing going with Mumble too.

I fucking hate Discord.

Literal spyware and all the brainless gamers just gobble it right up.

Yeah, every time somebody sets up a mumble server they're like "can you all join my Discord Server?". I'd be like "It's not 'your' Discord Server because it's hosted on a Computer that's not yours. I know the exact specs of My Mumble Server and the street address of where the server is located because it's in my basement."

The internet culture has devolved outside of self-reliance. You see it in social media, I'm thinking of closing my Facebook and Twitter and going back to forums.

Why the Discord hate here? Every time someone shouts "spyware" about this app, I do another little search on the internet and yet every time, I seem to end up on the usual fairly paranoid forum and reddit posts that simply put Discord in the same basket as Steam and Facebook. Sites like this don't help sell the story. Yes, they track stuff, like the messages you type? That's what the service is! Yes, they hold your email address. That's how you log in to the service.

So most of the hate seems to revolve around the "process logger" which is a feature of the thick client so that Discord can put a "scaine is playing Mothergunship" tag under my username when I start playing. It's opt-in too.

Bottom line, all the cries about "Discord is spyware" seem to come from a Stallman-like hatred for any and all proprietary programs. If that fits your ideals, great. But since I already use Spotify, Netflix, Prime, Steam, Twitter and Google products, it's pretty clear it doesn't fit mine.

Now maybe I'm just a "brainless gamer, gobbling it all up". But I don't think that "installing Discord is like installing Windows 10".

Seriously, I think GOL needs a :rollseyes: smiley. The over-reaction is real.

I played around with Mumble/Murmur/Riot (M/M/R)a couple few years back and got a Steam friend to test it out with me. I forget the details, but he was like "It's great, but Discord's easier." And that's why I think Discord's the King of game VOIP nowadays, it's almost impossibly easy to get on and talking with friends.

Still, because it is so heavy with stuff I don't need, I only use Discord when the Steam VOIP is going through one of its "your breaking up" phases. I just want to be able to talk to my friends easily when I game, maybe I can interest the core group of friends in M/M/R. It really was better.

scaineWhy the Discord hate here? Every time someone shouts "spyware" about this app, I do another little search on the internet and yet every time, I seem to end up on the usual fairly paranoid forum and reddit posts that simply put Discord in the same basket as Steam and Facebook.

It is the same as managing your own mail server. It's a lot of work to do but your data is yours. Of course you can use Gmail instead. You have to decide for yourself. But there are already good reasons why people want to control their means of communication themselves.

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